When a sweaty-palmed Jade Dernbach bowled a wide with West Indies needing seven to win off one delivery, it was easy to forget that his opening spell had been sort of all right.

It’s not a big thing, but it’s definitely progress. Someone seems to have persuaded Dernbach that variations are only such when they vary from something. His first delivery took a wicket, his first over was a maiden, but the real achievement was that those six balls were all roughly the same as each other.

Clearly they’re going to keep picking him – there’s nothing we can do about it – so we might as well try and support him, at least for the next few weeks. If that means refraining from commenting on embarrassing, dry-humping wicket celebrations which are entirely out of proportion for a dead rubber in a warm-up series, then so be it.

20 Appeals

To be fair, his last two balls were both the same as well. Granted, they were both wides, but I suppose at least he had a plan.

Its also only yesterday that I realised that Dernbach doesnt have a hairy chest, its just more elaborate tattoo creeping over the top of his shirt. And he does at least look like he gives a shit, if in a misguided way.

The brilliant news is that if the 6th best T20 side in the world leave out two of their best two players, then England are just about better than them. Thats progress.

And this might be the most clutching at straws couple of paragraphs I have ever written about anything ever.

If you’re new, you’re young. That’s the way it works, particularly if you play Twenty20 – which, as any fule kno, is a young man’s game. Look at Australia’s squad for the World Twenty20 if you don’t believe us.

If test cricket is my wife, and T20 is my mistress, what is 50-over cricket? Is it my best friend’s wife that I had a snog with one drunken night in 1997 before she was married to him? And what about those times when everyone’s out and I get my bat and just play a few shots on my own with a copy of The Cricketer magazine open on the table in front of me?

What if during one of your solo batting sessions, you have an accident and the ball, which was supposed to drop delicately on a predetermined surface, instead shoots out (because you played an over-excited cover drive on seeing a picture of Michael Vaughan in the magazine) and ruins the china just as your wife is entering the house? What then?

Hearing him speak for the first time, she said, “but I thought he was South African.” “He is from there”, I said. “But he doesn’t have the accent”, Daisy responded. “He has converted his accent to sarf London/estuary”, I explained.

Daisy is now reassessing Jade from a zero base. I mean that in both senses of the term zero base – she cannot understand how he even gets into squads. Daisy is working on a conspiracy theory about that one.

We’re back from holiday now, in case anyone was wondering, but our body clocks are still in Oman, hence the early hours posting.

I can only assume that the England camp’s fascination with Dernbach is due to his ability to carry out completely arcane and illogical plans, where most people would probably stop and say “hang on, that’s a rubbish plan” or “hmm, well this didn’t work the other 45 times”. Yes, this is the player you’d keep if you sacked Kevin Pietersen.

In the worst piece of scheduling ever, Bangladesh vs. Afghanistan was today and Ireland vs. Zimbabwe is tomorrow. The ICC has to know that these four teams are the runaway favorites in the qualifying stage. With only one team from each group going through, they should be playing each other last to create the maximum intrigue. This means that barring a massive upset, the victor of each group will effectively be decided after the first game, and turns the remaining five into dead rubbers where the only point to tune in is in case of a shocker.

It’s T20, so anything can happen, but you don’t want unpredictability to define the final stages of your tournament. You want it to get itself out of the way in the beginning, and the final to feature the best competition. You also want a team to get into the proper tournament after beating their toughest competition, not after coasting through easy wins over minnows having beaten their only competition in the first game.

This shouldn’t need that many words written about it, but apparently someone at the ICC didn’t figure it out.